I finally got around to setting up convenient links to a couple of social bookmarking sites. At first I resisted the idea, figuring regular users probably have bookmarklets or extensions that take care of it. But social networking sites have casual users, too, and posting a few small icons is a subtler form of self-promotion than putting up a giant banner that says, “Hey! Submit this #$!@ story to ____ now!”

I ended up using Sociable, a plugin for WordPress that already knows the right link formats for several dozen such sites.

Of course, since Sociable provides links for so many sites, the obvious question becomes: Which sites do I include? I don’t want to post all 25—that would just be a jumble of icons, hardly usable (never mind aesthetic!)

I settled on five to start with:

  • del.icio.us is my online bookmark service of choice. I still manage a lot of bookmarks locally, but this lets me share a set between multiple browsers at home and work.
  • Digg seems to be the leading service for actually sharing and discussing links these days.
  • Fark wasn’t on my list at first, but then I realized that I make funny/weird posts here all the time. Some of them would fit right in.
  • Reddit is new to me, but it popped up a couple of times when I went looking through sites that I read.
  • Yahoo MyWeb I mainly added out of name recognition.

What social bookmarking sites (if any) do you use?